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Le piace il nuovo presidente? (en → it)

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Le piace il nuovo presidente? (en → it)

Post by sentence bot 🤖 »

Le piace il nuovo presidente?

en: Does she like the new president?

Duolingo forum topic: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/41197973

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gmads
Mexico

Re: Le piace il nuovo presidente? (en → it)

Post by gmads »

Somebody asked in Duo's forum: Why is Le piace la nuova presidentessa marked as incorrect?

Here is CivisRomanus' answer:

Good question.

Presidente is a noun that indicates a position, or an office. Moreover, it ends with -e; this means that it can be used either for a male or a female (plural -i for both genders).

Traditionally, working positions and especially high offices were always held by men, and the suffice -essa was used to indicate the worker's or officer's wife (→ presidentessa = "the president's wife").

This suffix was also used for indicating the initially very scarce female students, officers, or professionals (whence lo studente → la studentessa; il dottore → la dottoressa).
But over the past three or four decades, the use of the suffix -essa has been debated, and quite a few linguists now deprecate its use, also because in the past it sometimes carried a slightly ironic nuance.

On top of this, presidente is the present participle of the verb presiedere, and present participles have only one form for either gender.

At present, dictionaries mention both la presidente and la presidentessa as the feminine form of il presidente, leaving the speaker free to choose.

So la nuova presidentessa is still fully legit, as well as la nuova presidente.

Studentessa and dottoressa are so deeply entrenched in the language that it would be difficult to switch to la studente and la dottore (although a few claims have been made for this to happen).

A similar dual usage occurs for the feminine of il vigile, whose recommended form is la vigile, but la vigilessa is more common in ordinary conversation. In this case, the noun comes from the adjective vigile which has only one form for the singular (l'uomo vigile, la donna vigile) and one for the plural (-i), as any 2nd class adjective does. So using the common suffix -essa is grammatically senseless.

Instead, for other positions and offices ending with -e, the same word is actually used for both genders, e.g. il giudice / la giudice; il preside / la preside, il console / la console.


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Last edited by gmads on Sat Jun 24, 2023 7:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Dana_Dany Danuta
Poland

Re: Le piace il nuovo presidente? (en → it)

Post by Dana_Dany Danuta »

Native language: 🇵🇱 Duolingo levels

Be smart and write poems. :D

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